Wednesday, July 9, 2008

The video parodies how many of us have been dragged into an understanding of how new technologies work. Viewing it might be comforting to some of us who occasionally get overwhelmed by how to make all this new-fangled gear work in our daily lives.

I'm attending Camp Plug and Play 3.0 in Tucson this week. It's a rigorous week-long training session -- held at a 5-star resort! -- that's conducted by the Arizona K-12 Center.

Yesterday all of the campers went on field trips in the area. I visited Biosphere 2 in Oracle. The University of Arizona is leasing it from the real estate developers who now own the property.

We toured the biomes, which include a rainforest, savannah, desert, and ocean under the glass. We went underground and walked through the basement filled with pipes and interesting signs such as "Upper Savanna Basement" and "South Lung." We left with some insights about how the eight "terranauts" lived (and suffered) during the two-year self-sufficiency experiment in the early 1990s.

We returned, downloaded our photos, made a slide show in iPhoto, converted it into a QuickTime movie, and uploaded it on TeacherTube. Here's a link to my hastily created movie. I shot over 250 photos (as well as shooting video and recording audio files to make into podcasts). However, we were encouraged to upload short videos because we're suffering the bandwidth blues this week as 133 campers and their instructors all try to search, use online tools, and upload content.